Media visionary Ted Turner introduced a radical new concept when he launched CNN back in 1980,

the 24-hour news cycle. The impact on the media industry was immediate and profound.

Audiences ate it up. Suddenly, 24-7 news was everywhere, giving news consumers a window

into what was happening around the globe. Politics, entertainment, even more as it happened,

changing how we see the world forever.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, May 13th,

2026. Ted Turner passed away last week at the age of 87. His impact on cable TV and the news

industry writ large will endure for generations to come.

He'll help me dig into his life, what he built.

I'm now joined by Michael Sokolow, a media scholar and a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.

Michael, it's so good to see you.

Good morning.

When CNN first launched, there were a lot of detractors,

some even derided it as, quote, chicken noodle news instead of the cable news network. That was nearly

50 years ago now. How radical of an idea was it? Why were so many people pessimistic about its

success? Well, it was radical in that it was 24-hour television news, but we have to remember that there was the model of radio news.

There was 24-hour radio news, which Ted Turner had used as kind of a model or a format that would be transposed onto television.

So it was radical in the idea of a 24-hour television news program that would be

constantly running. But the idea of getting your news at any time of the day or night had been around

for about 10 or 20 years. You recently published a piece for the conversation about Ted Turner's

impact on the news industry. You wrote that Ted Turner didn't just revolutionize news.

He changed the way we see the world.

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